Self-service financial terminals such as ATMs are commonly arranged to receive a card having magnetically stored data which can be employed to verify the identity of an individual accessing the self-service terminal. However, the requirement for using such a card does not prevent attempted fraud or other erroneous, or inappropriate, operation of the self-service terminal.
On the contrary ATMs and other self-service terminals provide opportunities for criminals to defraud customers and financial institutions by intercepting magnetic card and/or PIN information.
In recent years, it has been sufficient to merely acquire magnetic information from a card, offered to an ATM, by reading the magnetic stripe as the card enters or leaves the magnetic reader—a process known as “card skimming”. However, in order to eliminate such fraud, financial institutions worldwide are introducing “chip and PIN” cards. These are smart cards which cannot currently be easily copied, so criminals will inevitably move towards card capture. One known means of card capture from an ATM is a, so called, “Lebanese Loop”, which is a device which incorporates a filament of material, in the form of a loop, to constrain and thereby capture a card within the ATM card reader and prevent its return to the authorized user. The loop may be made from any strong flexible material from video tape to dental floss.
To-date, various defenses against such attacks have been attempted. Some approaches to this problem, such as the Applicants' earlier U.S. Patent, U.S. Pat. No. 6,196,463, attempt to detect the presence of a Lebanese Loop by electro-mechanical means which are inherently unreliable.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,196,463 a beam is projected from a source on a moving buggy which is swept across the complete width of the transport path, thus allowing the beam to be projected at the transport path across its entire width. Detecting means are arranged to receive an output signal and to detect the presence of an object in the path in response to the object interfering with the signal. However, the mechanical complexity of this solution renders it costly and unsatisfactory to ATM manufacturers.